The Entire Predicament Read online

  “Poor piano,” she said, wiggling her fingers. “All that music inside and no way out. Come, come, now, what was all that?”

  “I don’t know,” said his mother. “Nonsense really. I think he was trying to warn me. I can see right through him. It’s just so much work.” Light from the porch lamp tented them, and the nature of the moon, a reflective surface with no light of its own, was especially appropriate.

  “Coded. Coated,” said his aunt. “I know how it is. Look who I’m with. Not to mention the beak! Ha! Okay, not so funny. Here, I’ve got another one for you. When I was teaching, living in that crappy apartment. Had a neighbor. Shelley. How did I know her, really? I don’t remember. One day Shelley comes over, ravaged. It’s four in the afternoon. Man arrived to fix her sink and raped her. Pete. We learn this later. No question, girl was ravaged, heaving. Wouldn’t go to any hospital. Spent a couple of nights on my sofa. Said she had dreams of penises like feet.Then she went back to her place. I kept an eye on her but she retreated and soon enough there she is, lugging groceries up the staircase, huge, and then she’s having the baby.

  “She tries to prosecute the guy. I’d see him around, still fixing apartments. He says no sex happened, they do a blood test, then he says, well, maybe sex but no rape, so she gets child support. I don’t know. Having that baby. Not moving away. I moved before she did. Here, in fact. But this is more my point: I had a student, year or two after Shelley’s baby, this lovely, bright girl, very put together. Rose, my student. She got an award from the department—clever, inventive girl, very steady. This is when I put it together. I’m at the award ceremony and turn around to meet the girl’s father, and it’s the guy: Pete. From the rape. I guess he knows I know because his face gets chaotic and then he flees.

  “I can see his daughter, Rose. Then and now I can see her. She’s up on the stage where she’s supposed to be with those twats from the department.There behind the white tablecloth and that blue bunting, or what-d’ya-call-it, what they use to skirt folding tables.Table skirt. It that it? God, she’d been trying to catch his eye, to wave, watching for him and feeling happy to see him in the throng and meeting her professors, meeting me, and then there, he shakes my hand—my hand!—and, as soon as the guy starts fleeing, as soon as I put it together, I look up at the stage and I can see her change. It’s like something was cracking, this happy surface of hers. I could feel his vibrations still in my hand. Looking up at her. I just stood there and watched her whole world falling away. That rosy girl.” She gazed across the baby at her sister, who had laid him like a dulcimer across her lap. “She must have been suspecting something,” the aunt said. The consciousness of the aunt was, at this point, completely encased in her story. “Well,” she said, the case dissipating, “you can imagine.”

  The baby’s mother wasn’t thinking about the story, which was filled with the names of people she didn’t know. She thought about her sister’s stories and her husband’s stories. She thought, It’s always one thing or another. She thought about growing up, knowing more and more things, and having no idea how to put them together. It just wasn’t right. It was, she felt, unjust.

  The aunt looked at her and squinted. “Or perhaps, I see, you can’t,” she said.

  “Why did the woman have that baby?” asked his mother.

  “Hell, I don’t know. No offense, sugar,” said his aunt, leaning forward and patting his head as if it were his head. “But I was thinking about the girl. I mean Shelley, sure, same as always with raped people. But I mean that Rose who tried so hard and learned so much . . .”

  “I hear what you’re saying, but Dan’s not a rapist,” said his mother. “I know he wants to tell me something. I’ll figure it out. I’ll get it out of him. I have my ways,” she said, her voice lightening.

  “Cipher. Siphon,” said the aunt. “He’s something.”

  “He’s not bad. He’s just my husband.”

  “What’s bad? What’s bad enough?”

  “He’ s not bad like that. I am not a beaten wife.”

  “Just beaten? Just wife?”

  “Meg, you are exhausting and predictable. Look at you.”

  The aunt’s head hovered, damp and white, below the beaded porch ceiling.The baby didn’t know that he heard as if underwater, all sounds surrounded, glaze over a dark cake. Still, sounds moved for him like heavy-headed flowers on a faintly jiggling earth.

  “Echo,” he said, bubbles at his lips. “Atone.”

  “Look at this,” said the aunt, lifting an envelope from a pile of junk mail on the glass-top spool. “‘The information you requested is enclosed.’ Ha.”

  “Ba-ha!” called the parrot from behind the screen and the skeleton of its complicated cage. “Doll! Bone!”

  “Hold him,” said his mother. They shifted their springy swivel chairs toward each other and tilted the baby lap to lap. If he had not been wearing his cast, the baby could have felt the very top ribs of his aunt’s core against his back. His plaster brushed her clavicle. His mother wore a housedress decorated with tiny red apples, not what she’d been wearing before he’d slept. The apples lay along a grid in various phases of being eaten. Then his aunt turned him to face her. She looked into his round eyes with her crumpled ones. “Knock, knock,” she said, tapping his lid. “Is there anybody there? May I come in?” Some of the moon shone against the scalloped edge of the largest tree in the yard, the rest of it obscured by night-black leaves. His mother traveled from somewhere behind him to the corner of the porch and leaned on the rail with her elbows, holding the parrot’s feet in her fist. The parrot stood, cleanly outlined in the earliest of morning light, all silhouette and glow. Between his mother’s body and the parrot’s, white letters from the street sign shined, “uffin.”

  “Why did you end up with Sonny and not me?” his mother asked.

  “No one wants an inherited bird. Mother made me promise. And I liked him. And I was there.”

  “I like him a little. Sonny must be very old now. How old must he be?” she asked, a little to the bird himself.

  “Not old.That’s Sonny two. Sonny the second.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “New bird.”

  “No. It can’t be.”

  “Absolutely. God, where were you? Entirely new bird.What the hell, Beth? Why are you crying?”

  “Where was I? Where were you? It goes both ways.”

  “Beth,” she said, “no one is trying to fool you.”

  “I loved that bird. We grew up with that bird. First you, then me.”

  “It’s funny, Beth. It’s a parrot,” said the aunt. “Gertrude Stein did it with dogs. It’s even funnier with a parrot.”

  “Gertrude Stein is not funny. She’s incomprehensible, and that’s just mean.”

  “Look, when Sonny died, Mother was saying she’d really named him Sunny—like bask in the sun—but nobody ever wrote his name down, as far as anyone knew, until there I was, filling out a form at the vet’s. So, you know, we got a new bird. Then Mom died. I’m sure you remember. I believe you were out of town. In fact, I believe you were having marital problems, surprise, surprise. But good news: refrain from suicide and you could inherit this fine bird. Only one letter off the original!”

  “I thought I knew you,” said his mother. Then she opened her fist out of rage, and the parrot flew. He flew frantically, overcoming clipped feathers. He made it to the sign and rested over “Rd.” Then he heaved himself into the tree and disappeared within it. Dawn creaked, beginning to hum under the ending night. An entire family walked by: a man, a woman, and two little children, all wearing yellow rain gear and carrying fishing nets. In front of them, the baby saw his mother looking in his direction very angrily. Part of him knew his aunt’s face hovered above his, but he still felt it. “What happened to Sonny one?”

  “Old bird,” said his aunt, sipping. “Drank too much.”

  She stood, bringing her glass, and shifted him so that he hung by his bar on the crook of her elbow, upsid
e down again. Then she went inside and collected the bird’s cage with her free hand. She took everything back to the porch and set the cage on the giant spool. Then they went back into the house: aunt, baby, glass.The baby saw the paneling in the living room, warm, thick, and deep brown, and the sudden white hallway, and then the blond kitchen cabinets with their glowing celestial knobs. He heard water sounds, and something like the sound of the factory you could hear from the cellar apartment—but this sound was as close as the counter and the other was far away and he knew nothing about a factory. He heard tap, tap and tinkle, tinkle. He heard ajar lid pop and he heard his aunt sucking her finger. He saw the knob blur and then the white hall all white but somehow still in motion, and then the ruddy wood, and then, shift, zoom, through the screen door.

  His aunt put the new martini into the cage. She tapped its edge with a glass swizzle stick. They heard rustling in the tree. The bird emerged. He stumbled through the air, but when he lighted on the table a dignity fell into his body and he arranged his feathers along their paths, and he felt his weight on his spindly feet. He eyed the martini. He eyed it as if he could kill it. He walked toward it. He stepped over the threshold. He walked around to the far side of the glass and stood over it. He could have been gazing at his reflection in a pool. He did not drink yet.The aunt did not even close the cage door.

  “Give him to me!” his mother said, and for a moment the baby was a bridge, a connection between them, a current, his aunt holding his bar in the suspense. “I don’t understand these people,” his aunt said, as if he were a puppet, but looking at his mother, which he could not see. “Do you understand these people? I mean they’re your parents.You’re made of them. And you’re going to become them.”Then she let go, and his mother clamped her baby to her body.The world jerked and bobbled and then he could see the house through his mother’s hair.“I’m going home. I’m going home,” she said like an incantation.

  “You left your purse in the kitchen,” called her sister.

  Between them groaned a great heaping gulf of air.

  “Come on, I bought yellow jammies,” called her sister.

  Between the sister and his mother shapes loomed in code, almost being things.

  “He’s such an asshole,” she called, standing near her bird. “Elizabeth, you are marching to your doom!”

  But couldn’t there be, in the future, some beautiful new thing?

  They’d reached the bicycle where it sprawled, the mother and the baby. One wheel made its circle on the walkway and one pressed a mark in the yard. She lifted his bar to her shoulder but he kept slipping down and she couldn’t seem to lift the bike without getting tangled. They spilled. Her sneaker slipped in the green dew and the slick ivy and he landed on concrete.

  Now, a cast is not all plaster or he’d have hatched in a fine full crumbling crash. As it was, he felt a small thud and a collapse. Air came in. His neck let his head turn to the side. The bar that held his legs apart dropped and rolled away. Asphalt was cool and pebbled against his cheek. The bird said, “Oboe! Ink! I’ll have another!” On a crack in the sidewalk, the baby bloomed.

  The Entire Predicament

  My head hovers over the floor, and my hair dangles, and my foot teeters near my ear, and my backside is exposed. I’m separated. I’m gagged and behind my gag I can’t feel my voice. Homebound, on my very own threshold, I am of two minds or more about most things. I am of no mind about the rest, suspended, here in the doorway, within a network of ropes. I’m dangling upside down, one foot bound to the door frame, an arm bending somewhere behind my back, another hip rotated, thigh stretching toward my ear, knee bent, a foot hovering somewhere above it. I have never felt so asymmetrical.

  A bird yaks from a tree in the yard behind me. Bright air moves like a thousand singing bees as I breathe. I can release my head and look at the floor or I can raise it and gaze across my house. I can see beyond the living room, past the breakfast bar, into the shining kitchen, and beyond that, through the glass doors to my pool fuming with chemicals. Expensive house, cheaply made. Inside, the doors are hollow, the knobs brass plated. Nick a wall and it crumbles.

  I’ve lost the education I worked so hard for, or at least, it turns out I know nothing. My money is down the drain; I can see my last dollar from here, where I swing in the doorway, shifting my weight enough to revolve; I can see it blooming in the kitchen sink. My dog caught two rabbits in the backyard, finally, after years of failure. He slung them in a bundle over his shoulder and went packing.

  My country’s at war, and I don’t mean venereal disease.

  I swing here, hung, dumb, limb after limb, by hook and crook, bound, naked, open. I’m also turning. I moon every direction I don’t face as I turn. I moon the blank world out my front door, and then I moon the desirable open floor plan inside. I moon my living room and its seven broad windows, and I moon the kitchen beyond it, mirrored deep in the appliances. I moon the patio set beyond the sliding glass doors. Sunshine hums in the windows and gushes along the walls, bounces and lolls on the flanks of my overturned furniture, the coffee table warming its belly, the sofa slashed, stuffing bulging, books like fallen moths, bits of china and glass from the buffet doors fairy-dusting my Pergo floors and tasseled throw pillows. How many hours has it been since my sunny eggs winked from their squares of toast? Since the tongue of my dog splashed in his water dish, since I sprinkled confetti for the fish, since my daughter donned her red boots and tromped to the school bus with bows in her hair and my husband, the dumb lug, backed over the roses on his way into town for the bacon? Enough hours for my hands to grow rubbery in their rope cuffs, for blood to fill my ears to bursting, my eyes rolling in their humble sockets, my brain rocking in its everlasting bath. How many hours since my dear withdrew himself from my cozy body and flopped onto his back in the moonlight, his grin sliding about his face, the silhouetted dots on the dotted bedroom curtains swaying in the breeze as I am swaying now, the motion moving them like a galaxy in a planetarium, night insects cruising and making their soft landings on the sill and on the branches of the tree that drags its nails across our shingles—

  And before that the sleeping in feathers—

  And before that the dog curled with the daughter in the wooden bed—

  And before that the peace of nothing happening that I even thought to know of—

  And before that the lives I could have led, and the cells that made me.

  Anyone could see I can do nothing, nothing, but there’s nobody that I can see to see me. As I turn I can look across the planks of my porch and if I tuck my chin I can see my lawn above me and the broad black band of the street with no cars parked along it because everyone’s taken all their cars to work, and on errands and vacation. Or else the neighbors are cowering in their houses, cars tucked into garages with the doors squeezed shut, or else they’re peeking through their windows and they can see me and I make them afraid to come out. All I can see through my windows as I pass one and then the next are boiled reflections of the ideas of the colors of things like flowers, like hedges, like lampposts, like a cloud here and then there, and that’s all.

  My vertebrae push at the skin of my back. My whole skeleton is apparent to me as it has never been before. It’s as if I don’t have the fat I have. It’s as if I’m stripped of more than clothes. What’s left of my breasts slides near my armpit on one side and under my chin on the other. When I turn, backside out, craned neck bulging, I feel my home and my body as intricate and intricately connected contraptions, a Rube Goldberg that produces the drip of my mere and continuing life. The ropes that stretch and support me are like the wires and pipes in the walls. My cavities are rooms, my organs are furniture, my blood, transporting air, is air. Now, truly for the first time since my babyhood, there is nothing I can do. I can cry or I can not cry. As a baby I cried, but now if I know anything I know better. I can hold my breath. I can open or I can close my eyes.

  I close my eyes. Here, upside down and overbalanced, the thing th
at happens is not what I make happen, it’s what I am within the definition of suspense. First, my shoulders ache, and next they ache more. They ache in relation to how much my neck aches which aches in relation to my ankles which ache unlike each other because of how simultaneously bent and splayed I’m hung. The only other thing that happens in the time I can witness by the wall clock in the kitchen with the rooster on its face as I pass is the ticking of my mind as it tracks the shifting pulse of my body and maneuvers around the ideas lodged in its coils. My mind is a lost snake stuffed in a bowl and pressed. My mind is a snake too crushed to strike.

  I open my eyes. I am turning, upside down and tangled, as if on a vertical spit, such that window after window passes in a rhythm, and then, as I let my eyes blur, I can begin to see the walls of my square house ease into curves and soon my windows make one watery strip of blue-green world. All this motion, and I am almost used to it, time passing and nothing happening outside my body’s placement within everything, in fact I am almost used to this level of pain, almost content to spin within it, when peeping into the windows I see bobbing mounds of heads of hair, and one has doffed a cap, and one has pigtails like ears on her head, and another has a blow pop in her mouth, and another has a backpack that bounces up behind him as he bounces, and another must be holding an enormous toy giraffe because the giraffe’s head bobs above his head and hops with him, and nods as the boy hits the ground below the sill, and bends as the boy is rising or falling each time I pass. Children are bouncing in no particular rhythm; they’re like whack-a-moles at a county fair.

  I unblur my eyes a little and I can see mountains creeping up behind them, green and brown, and then the children rise in slow motion and stop, framed in groups of twos and threes in the windows, as if secreted in my shrubbery, looking into my house and at my family’s things, looking at me in my doorway, backdropped by the empty street. They wiggle but are almost still, as if making every effort at a dinner table.